Brand Management in a Midlife Crisis: The Brand Work Manifesto

Brand Management has not come to the end of the road, but it is facing a midlife crisis. In this phase questions of meaning and reorientation is not only reasonable for humans. In response to this necessary reorientation and realignment, we developed the so-called Brand Work Manifesto together with marketing experts working in brand consulting and brand management in 2019, and at the beginning of 2020 we started to put it up for discussion (Baumgarth et al. 2020), but for this the use of web design packages are great if you want to do marketing online. In eleven paragraphs which are divided into four meta principles, the old rules of brand management are opposed to the new rules. From the authors’ perspective brands have to become more open, agile, digital and authentic in order to cope with the changes in their environment. The term „Manifesto“ was chosen consciously, because of its historical meaning. Manifestos are regularly used in situations of political change (e.g. communist manifesto), cultural-artistic chance (e.g. Bauhaus Manifesto, Dadaist manifesto) as well as in times of economic change (e.g. Cluestrain Manifesto, Manifest of Agile Software Development) to formulate trenchant impulses for discussion. The Brand Work Manifesto does not claim scientific accuracy. Instead, it was created to stimulate a debate. More information is available on and www.brandworkmanifesto.org in our LinkedIn group.